Exploring Human Potential

“Don’t mess with my Medicaid!” That was clearly the takeaway for Republican legislators heard as they met with hometown crowds in the lead up to their historic Trumpcare defeat. Whether they have “given up the ghost” only time will tell. But as the facts below suggest, going back at Medicaid today means attacking a program […]

Mike Magee One of the most enduring myths that we Americans support when it comes to Canadian health care is that it is a nationally run, monolithic offering with little variability. That is patently false. In fact, Canada’s official beginnings in health governance began in the province of Saskatchewan in 1946. For several decades they […]

Mike Magee As we have seen, America’s health care system – disintegrated, opaque and heavily conflicted – didn’t just happen. It is the result of thousands of conscious decisions over nearly a century. Choices made have tipped the scale toward intervention, technology, and medicalization at every turn. Peggy Noonan suggested this week that Paul Ryan’s […]

Mike Magee Republicans this week demonstrated with clarity that further tinkering with our broken health care system will almost certainly add cost and undermine quality and coverage. To begin to define a way back home, we need to initially focus on two fundamental challenges. Problem 1: Defining a National Health Care Vision There is an […]

Mike Magee In the 2008 classic movie, A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson explodes under the relentless pressure of prosecutor Tom Cruise, and yells “You can’t handle the truth!” A careful critical examiner of the US health care dilemma in 2017, in the shadow of our neighbor to the north, might easily draw the same […]

Mike Magee During the Hillary Clinton health care debate of the 1990’s, our approach to health care delivery was compared to multiple other nations – including Canada. Supporters of our status quo worked hard to emphasize other nations differences and weaknesses. The criticism of Canada, which even then was registering demonstrably better outcomes at a […]